Not someday, but next week

If you’re trying to do something big and complicated that you’re not sure whether you can pull off — don’t. Or do it, but get a lot of help. (Library of Congress photo)

When I first started this blog, I did not allow myself to plan.

I knew that if I stopped to plan, I would psyche myself out. Instead, I just started writing.

There was something soothing about the fact that each thing I posted here was meant to be a discrete piece of writing, on one topic, with a beginning, middle, and end. I didn’t have to figure out how they all fit together.

In fact, that was going to be the point of writing. Once I had ten or twenty or a hundred posts, I would (hopefully) be able to see some common threads running through.

That’s exactly what happened. And it’s still soothing to write and post these short, discrete pieces without having to link them all up.

I don’t have to come up with a master plan. I’m doing the work and letting that plan evolve into being.

I am not anti-planning the way I used to be. I do favor spontaneity in many aspects of life, and generally I prefer to prepare thoroughly as opposed to creating lesson plans, itineraries, and schedules I have to commit to. But planning can be an essential part of such preparation, and it has deep benefits.

Planning can lead to strategic action in which minimal effort is wasted and maximum results are gained.

However, planning can also be a place to hide. You can plan and plan and never actually do the thing.

To avoid this, we need to include short timescales in our plan. What will happen today, this week, and next week? Let’s bring it forward. We can’t plan for someday — we have to make the work real and present.

When we’re thinking about what we’re going to make happen now, we are forced to consider our present skills. We realize that we are setting ourselves up for failure if we include skills we don’t already have without also creating a plan to acquire them. Making the plan doable today with what we have, makes it much more likely that we’ll actually be able to follow through on the plan.

Another benefit of a plan that begins today is that we accelerate any identity shifts that are necessary. A writer writes. A musician makes music. A director directs. Whatever would be required of us in this “someday” plan is now required of us right now, and we can face our resistance head on instead of deferring it forever.

A lot of this “someday” stuff is baked into our culture. As a music educator, how often did I hear about how this or that kid was “going to be a great musician someday”? I always wanted to point out that the kid was a musician now. A child’s musicianship is undermined by a focus on the unknown future. Instead, we can honor and cultivate their current skills. We can appreciate and respect who they are as a musician today.

People love to hear about big dreams and big changes. Tell everyone you know on Facebook that you’re quitting your job to start a new business, and the algorithm will rocket that post straight to the top of everyone’s news feed (it works best if you include a picture of yourself smiling).

Tell them that you’re testing a handful of different ideas, and you’re not exactly sure which one you’ll go with yet? Share a website with one blog post on it? Boring. You’ll get ten likes on that one (as long as you don’t link to the blog post — then you’ll get three). that news is too mundane for anyone to get excited about.

And yet, this is where we begin. When you follow the lofty “someday” plan all the way back to the first actions you have to take, they are not and should not be glamorous. That’s what makes them doable. And that’s what will make you successful in doing them and moving on to the next thing.

If you’ve got a big dream, beautiful. How do we make it into a series of smaller ones that can ultimately lead you there? What can you do with the skills and knowledge you have today to make the first “smaller dream” happen by the end of next week?

Nobody’s going to be watching or cheering you on. Nobody will be impressed. Good. Enjoy that freedom. Use it. Do the work, and watch yourself and your project change and grow slowly and unremarkably. Congratulations — you’re doing it, day by day.